Category: Editing tips

Talking captions

A thread at the Visual Editors board muses on the best way to write a photo caption (I know, some of you call them cutlines). I liked this bit of advice. Back in photo-j school I was taught a very…

For all you biz/financial editors

Occurs to me there might be a story in the profusion of blogs about the stock market. I’m a bit of a dabbler, as you might’ve noticed after my reams of verbiage about the Google IPO. Last summer I started…

Gotta love those lawsuits

Joe Adams, Florida’s numero uno open-records guru, shares the oft-told advice that there’s no telling what you can unearth by poking around in the local courthouse’s civil lawsuit files. For instance: Documents obtained by Ray Parker of the Naples Daily…

Leave them to their grief, please

A second-day story in the St. Pete Times opens with a description of a man breaking down because he’s arrived at the place where his 16-year-old daughter died the day before when her SUV swerved out of control, flipped and…

Mixing tenses makes me tense

I stopped by Side Salad‘s employer’s Web site to see if his co-workers provided any blogworthy offenses. Found something on the first try, just like the last time I tried this. Maybe I’m just too picky, but this annoys me:…

When the lede needs a rewrite

Today I thought I’d share some useful line-editing advice for a change. For the heck of it I stopped by Tim Ball’s paper, the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, to mine for news nuggets that would provoke my editorial urge.…

Bottom-up editing

Nicole offers a bit of novel advice: Get in the habit of doing one read on stories backward, starting with the last paragraph, then the second-to-last, etc. This will allow you to focus on the grammar and individual words rather…

How to behave

Phillip Blanchard offers etiquette tips for copy editors. Q. I’m a young copy editor on a desk with experienced hands and sometimes I don’t know how to behave. Do you have any tips? — Anonymous in L.A. A. Sure. We’re…

Keep your editor happy

Media Bistro has a bunch of tips for free-lance writers on avoiding collisions with their editors. Among the suggestions: Most editors are in a position to offer a bit of wiggle room on a deadline as long as you give…

Careful what you ‘refuse’

From a story about the tumult in the former Soviet republic of Georgia: For Shevardnadze, the silver-haired 75-year-old president who served as Soviet foreign minister in the waning days of the Soviet Union and has led his troubled country of…